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Ensuring the integrity of elections should not be at cross-purposes with protecting the right of citizens to vote. In Texas, however, those two worthy objectives are in conflict as a result of a flawed law passed by the Legislature in 2011 with bipartisan support.

That law added the Social Security Administration's death master file to the sources the Texas Secretary of State uses to identify deceased individuals and purge their names from voter rolls. The file, with 93 million records, draws on a variety of public and private sources for reported deaths. Any database that large is bound to have errors, especially those involving people with common names.

To comply with the law, Secretary of State Hope Andrade notified county elections officials across Texas of two categories of suspected deceased voters: strong matches from more reliable sources traditionally used in purging the deceased from voter rolls, and weak matches for those flagged by the Social Security death master file.

For the 68,000 weak matches, the onus was on voters to respond to a letter within 30 days to avoid being removed from voter lists. As expected, those matches included plenty of reports of deaths that were, as Mark Twain might say, greatly exaggerated.

Four of the recipients of those letters — who are very much alive — filed suit to block implementation of the new law. Last week, the state and the plaintiffs reached an agreement that properly makes it the responsibility of elections officials to confirm that voters are dead before purging voter lists rather than voters having to prove that they are alive.

A better solution would be for the Legislature also to remove the Social Security Administration's death master file as a source to cancel voter registrations. The state's method of cleaning up voter lists wasn't broken — until lawmakers decided it needed fixing.